How To Become A Scandal

“Those who think they are playing to an unseen audience often find that they are abruptly on stage without a stitch. Why do they need this validation and why do we so much enjoy providing it? In How to Become a Scandal Laura Kipnis investigates the dirty habits of the heart and illuminates the secret places of the psyche, speculating brilliantly and amusingly about the trouble to which people will go to get themselves exposed.” —Christopher Hitchens, author of Hitch-22

We all relish a good scandal. Why do people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why do we so enjoy watching them? The motifs are classic—revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness—though the pitfalls are ones we all negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deception—the necessary ingredients—are our collective plight.

“A must-read for anyone unable to look away from another’s fall from grace. . . . Reading her clever book is like sitting in a front-row seat at Scandal Theory 101—and serves as a cautionary tale for those tiptoeing on the edges of indignity. . . . How to Become a Scandal is as transfixing and engrossing as the tremendously chaotic tales she recounts with exacting detail.”—Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Beast

“Kipnis freshly illuminates her subjects’ plights, while scrutinizing the public delight in their misfortune, wearing her learning so lightly that the reader is easily seduced by her quick wit and her camouflaged erudition. Kipnis ties psychoanalysis and reality TV, detectives and literary critics, talk show hosts and sociologists, along with the scandalizers and the scandalized into a persuasive bundle: “Scandals aren’t just fiascoes other people get themselves embroiled in while the rest of us go innocently about our business,” she argues. “[W]e all have crucial roles to play.” A deliciously flippant tone serves the reader the juicy details we savor so about scandal, while tossing in some timeless questions and speculations about the deeper meaning of it all (“free will, moral luck, the stranglehold of desire, the difference between right and wrong”) as though they were mere garniture. This is a dead serious book that’s an utter lark to read.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review